99% Invisible - The Original 100 Objects

Episode Date: July 21, 2026

Neil MacGregor reflects on creating the landmark series that changed how people think about history. Then, revisit the Rosetta Stone, the artifact that unlocked ancient Egypt. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of 99% Invisible ad-free and a whole week early. Start a free trial now on Apple Podcasts or by visiting siriusxm.com/podcastsplus.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. In 2010, a history of the world in 100 Objects hosted by Neil McGregor premiered on BBC Radio 4 to great acclaim. It was a groundbreaking series that told a complex and interconnected history of the world through 100 objects housed in the British Museum collection. For 2026, BBC Studios decided they wanted to revamp and reimagine that ambitious series, this time focusing on the history of the history of the U.S. United States, coinciding with the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. To the great credit of the BBC, they thought that maybe British broadcasters weren't the best equipped to take on the curation of 100 objects that told the history of the United States. So that's when they reached out to me, lifelong American, Roman Mars.

With our 100 Object series, we knew we wanted to get out of the museum and focus on objects that were overlooked, thrown away, mass produced and misunderstood, not priceless museum pieces, but the everyday things that provide a portal into stories about what America means to itself and to the world at large. But from the beginning, I knew I needed sage advice to do the job right. And so I sought the council of the original 100 Objects host, Neil McGregor. Here's our conversation. What I was hoping you could do to begin with is taking back to January 2010, a history of the world in 100 objects is launching. It starts with a mummy that you saw as a boy. Were you aware

of the phenomenon that this was going to be when you started? No, absolutely not. Absolutely not. I was intimidated. We were all intimidated by the fact that the BBC had committed to a series of 100 programs. We had no idea how it was going to be received at all. And in a strange way, the project it began really almost as an internal project in the British Museum. What's interested me having come from the National Gallery, so a paintings collection, to a museum, the ambition of which was to show really the history of humanity through things, so not an art museum.

But to try to explore what it meant to put objects all over the world into one building. So it really began as a way of exploring what happens when you think of a museum as a place where different objects are exploring the same kind of human experience. And of all the things in the building, how did you choose the hundred?

Well, this was the greatest fun. The British Museum is created in the middle of the 18th century. Really, at that moment of the Enlightenment, when people begin to have a totally different notion of what humanity means, it's the physical expression of that enlightenment notion that there is one humanity. So what we decided to do was to try to organise the 100 objects.

Well, the BBC decided that there would be five programmes a week and there needed to be a theme for each week. And we wanted to go effectively from the beginning, the earliest hand tools made by anything that can roughly be called human right up to today. So that gave us the format. And that in each week we would go round the world. So you would take, let's say, you know, 1,000 BCE and look at a theme, let's say, power.

And how do different societies represent power at 1,000 BCE? Yeah. But what it meant internally was that for every week, I would sit down with a curator from the Chinese collection, the Indian collection, Egyptian collection, the America's collection, and we would have to think of what objects might speak to each other. Of course, for academics and a particular discipline, this is a totally new way of thinking. There was no connection between ancient Egypt and ancient China. So no Egyptologist was likely to have asked what in my collection might relate to something

that's happening at the same time in China. Yeah. Because there's no connection. It's an anthropological question asked to, people who are historical scholars. And they found that completely thrilling because it's allowed them all really to look at familiar objects and ask a totally new kind of question

and suggest the commonalities of human behavior wherever we are. We all behave roughly, equally badly, equally well. And surprisingly, more or less in the same way. Yeah. Were there heated arguments? Was there, you know, table pounding when people were deciding which artifacts to... Curators don't normally pound the table.

There was a certain amount of shrill advocacy. Okay. For my particular piece and a certain amount of sulking that others didn't make it. But it was normally extremely good timid. And because it was a new kind of conversation for all of them, very, very excited. And because what we were looking at was not the history of the world, but our history, a very peculiar one. And one of the histories we wanted to tell almost unspoken through it, because every object came from the museum,

was how did it happen that every one of these objects ultimately wound up in London? Was there a sense that you had to present a variety of objects? Because you could certainly do, you could do a history of the world. in a hundred coins. The joy of a collection at the British Museum is that you have so many different media in which humans articulate what matters to them, which is what all these things are about.

But the main purpose of doing history through objects was we wanted to allow people who don't have a voice to be heard. History is on the whole, used to mean, of course, just written history. That limits you immediately to that small bit of humanity that wrote. And it also limits you normally to the people that were in control. Because they were the ones that wrote the history. And they made sure it survived.

So part of our project was to have a history told by the people that had never been able to tell their story. By the makers. Through the things they're made. And that, I think, is really important. How do you give a voice to the voiceless of the past? Yeah, yeah. And particularly when you're talking about indigenous histories, then the objects become of huge importance as carrying the stories that weren't written and may not have survived in song or myth. So around the same time in 2010, I launched my show called 99% Invisible, and it's about architecture and design.

and there was a certain kind of perversity to doing a radio show about architecture and design because there's hugely visual things. And you made the same choice to do a radio series on these things that most people take in with their eyes. Why did you do that? What did you get out of that? Well, at one level, it is totally counterintuitive, isn't it? We're talking about things, the materiality of things, how they're made, the skill with which they made, and yet you can't see it.

This is where I think the BBC radio, they know how to do this. But it's not just that. BBC has, I think, understood very profoundly and built on the fact that if you can only hear something, then you have to imagine what it is. And you can take possession of something you imagine much more fully than something you just see reproduced in front of you. is why I think we're nearly always disappointed when we see a film of a book

because in reading the book we've imagined the carriage of the place and they've become ours, part of the way we live and think. And the same with objects. If you have to do the mental imaginative work of creating the object for yourself, you are invested in it, you possess it in a way that is not really possible, I think, with just an image. I find that if you lead with the story of an object, you fall in love with it in a different way, whereas like your visual reaction to maybe seeing Rosetta Stone is like, I was expecting something more impressive or something like this. But you can tell the sort of the import of it, what it meant, the story of how it was created and, you know, even the mundane way which it existed.

I think that's right. Because what we were really trying to tell was 100 biographies of an object. And because we only have one life. but objects have many, many lives. And what we got very interested in was the changing role of the object through time. In ways I don't know, nobody,

when the people carve the Rosetta Stone, this is a tax decree, it's a bit of tax law. And it's so boring. Beyond boring. Nobody carving that tax law in the three languages for administrative purposes in the Union

had any idea what it would one day come to mean. And there is something wonderful about that in an object, that the object can play a role that nobody could have guessed. Yeah, yeah. It makes their biographies much more engaged, much more alive, I think, than our own dull little predictable lives. Totally.

So when you wrote and conceived of the series and produced it, you know, you're the head director of this august institution, the British Museum, as people hold it in great esteem. And I wondered if you noticed your relationship with the public changed when you weren't director, Neil McGregor. You were my pal, Neil McGregor, who I'm invited into my home to tell me a story about a cool thing.

I think everybody's discovered that if you speak a lot on the radio, people feel they know you. And you must have been the same thing, that very disconcerting experience of actually being recognized in a lift by your voice. Yeah, yeah. The first time it happens, it's very, very peculiar. And one of the things that I think is interesting about it is that it allowed us to reaffirm that the public collections in Britain as in the United States are not the collections of the state, but the collections of the people.

I mean, when the British Museum is created in the 7050s, the idea is that it should be the private collection of every citizen. not the collection of the king open to everybody. Completely different conception from the continental European model. So the idea of speaking directly into people's houses about their collection, their things. I mean, everything I was talking about belonged to the people listening to it. Why did you choose to examine the hundred objects chronologically? And what problems did that cause or what solutions did it provide? I think it has to be chronological.

because one of the things that happens across human issues is that we create a technology and then it helps us do something and then we become completely dependent on it. We can't live without it. The hand axe, the simple stone scraping hand axe is what lets us as humans live anywhere in the world. But then once you're there, you can't live without it. We've seen the same with mobile phones than the last 20 years. It opens something and then it creates what can be a very dangerous dependency. So that was one strand.

And one of the key meta-nourages, I think, of any museum is the growing connectedness of the world. The fact that you can't tell a single story to use Chimamanda Adich's phrase. The story of the world is an interconnected story. So if you like, why we want to do it chronologically was to show that. constantly intensifying power of exchange curiosity about

other places trade, greed, war, whatever but that has intensified steadily across the millennia until you can't really tell a single

narrative of a national story. And that was one of the points we wanted to make. The idea of a national history, I'm sorry to say

that somebody was writing history in the United States, but the idea of and national history is unthinkable without situating that nation. Absolutely. In the global context.

We are in agreement, for sure. But it does present this problem is like the beginning set of objects are all objects that are prehistoric. There's not written records about them. Like you have to sort of conceive of the story differently because there isn't a record of how it was made or why it was made. And so your set of stories really gets sort of limited. And then it opens up as you go along. I would disagree. I disagree. It narrows down the more we know about the... I guess that's true.

I mean, the whole point of, seems to be the central point of any kind of historical investigation is your poetic involvement with somebody else. That you have to think, what is it like to be somebody else? Because that's the basis of all tolerance. I mean, if you're like, the whole venture was really Gulliver's travels. You go off around the world. You find these astonishing things. things, wild things. But the point of Gulliver's travels is not

that the people in Brobding, Nag are huge and Lilliput-Tin. The point is that when you come back to England, you realize we're pretty peculiar. Yeah, yeah. We're the odd ones. Interesting. And to de-normalize, to remove yourself as the norm, is the precondition of tolerance. And that's what Gulliver's about.

It's what the British Museum's about. And it's what the series was meant to be about. Yeah. That's interesting. I love that approach. One of the things I marveled at in the series is you're touching everything. You're always describing it as a first-hand experience. And for one reason you do that is it's a little more radiophonic. It allows you to have something happening as you're talking, so it's not just a lecture.

But the other part of it is it puts you in the first-person narrative of this object. It does. The difficult thing about that, which I found very hard to know how to manage, is where the object has, for the people who made it and possibly for people today as well its own kind of sacred existence

its own life and how one ought then with proper reverence, proper respect hold or touch this object without having those beliefs and that took us into very interesting areas

of the extent to which you study can study objects in ways which are contrary to the belief patterns, belief assumptions of those who made them, how do we address an Australian original object, which may have sacred resonances in a respectful way? Interesting. Interesting. So one of the things I found there's this moment in the series quite laid into it where you

talk to David Hockney, which is the first person you talked to who made the person. the object that you're talking about, which is it's such a change compared to the rest of the series. What was that like? Well, it was very thrilling. We had, you know, I'd been waiting to get to an object made by somebody where we could speak to the maker.

The very first object was one and a half million years ago on the stone chopping tools. Obviously, but we had David Attenborough instead. Yeah, well, that's pretty good. Which is almost do to tell us, what's going on, how this fits into the animal-human differentiation.

But it was wonderful with David Hockney because the objects we were talking about were a series of prints he'd made really about gay life in Egypt, the poems of Kavafi. And we chose the objects for several reasons. In the 20th century, we wanted to choose objects that would address the questions of new kinds of freedom. So we had votes for women, it was one, gay rights, another. We wanted to, of course, to present what it was like to make the objects and why David himself, obviously, very committed to gay rights, what it meant to him to read the poems, above all, and then to make the prints,

and then what it would mean to him to have the prints used, looked at, and spread the campaign, advanced the campaign, for gay rights internationally. But it was a, as you say, it was a real turning point. Yeah. To be able to speak to the maker for the first time. There was also, there was a lot of excitement for the choice of the final 100th object. You deliberately didn't reveal it until the last minute.

You invited listeners to suggest it. What was it? Why did you choose it? And how did people react to it? We're enormous fun trying to decide what was the last. last object to choose. We wanted to choose an object that spoke to a totally globalised world. We also wanted to end, of course, on a note that would be hopeful. So we eventually came down to two objects. One was a football shirt. Okay. A football shirt of a West African, a Frogba,

a Francophone, West African, who was the great star of Chelsea. Yeah. And Chelsea was owned by Russian oligarch Bridget. And the football shirt had been made illegally in China but bought in Latin America. So that object seemed to

us to pull together quite a lot of the world as it now is. What we ultimately went for was slightly more serious. It was a solar panel rechargeable mobile phone because the mobile phone seemed to us to be the equivalent of the hand axe, the chopping tool.

The first technology that had enabled humans to move around the world. And this latest one that enabled humans to communicate around the world. We were interested in it because it's become, of course, in so many areas, an element of emancipation, particularly women, enabling women to bank, enabling women to trade. And, of course, the other dimension of solar power, which we wanted to bring in, is that in political terms,

this has become a very important thing because in large areas of Africa and Asia, the electric currents, cables, two areas, could be controlled by political bosses. and areas could either be not cabled or have cables removed or whatever. The solar power, at a stroke, removes that power, removes that political control. So it seemed to us to be in many, many ways, an emblem of liberation, an emblem of the growing technologies which change our lives and then we become dependent on them. It's also about talking.

and, of course, many people listen to the BBC on their mobile phone, so it was also a nod to patron. Absolutely. Radio is the most important thing. The BBC. Of course, you know where your bread is butter. That makes sense. But it was also the solar-powered lamp,

which also extended the day. And it's all about this sort of individualized freedom and the ability of this technology frees you for all kinds of things. That's what we wanted to, again, finish on how these technologies do, unquestioning, make life better. Yeah. Because the solar panel will give you the lamp, which means you can work at home if you're a student without address, whatever. And it also means you don't need to burn for your lighting materials, which are likely to cause you lung problems and health difficulties. Yeah.

So in every way, it's potentially a good thing. And we wanted to end on a good 100th thing. I'm interested in what you think of the series' legacy now. It's an early example of podcasting being really successful. I think it had more listeners globally than it did inside of the UK. What do you think of the legacy of the show? Well, we've been as surprised by the legacy, as we were by the response initially. I think it has definitely had an impact in terms of reminding.

finding people that the everyday object has its own biography, its own history. And that takes you back to the dignity of the maker and the user. So what it does as a history is it takes away the great moment that we're taught. You don't have the Battle of Waterloo. Yes. Why would it figure? Absolutely. Because that's not the kind of history.

So it opens the way to other histories told by other people. Yeah. And that's why A history versus D history. Exactly. And that was very important. One of the slightly, it's been translated into a lot of languages, the book. One of the vexing things is in some countries, some translations, the publisher insisted on making it the history.

So maybe in translation, the and R mean different. things in different languages. Yeah. You know, this idea of a history and the fact that objects mean different things to different people, this came up a lot, as you've alluded to already, you would talk to folks who would differ

from even designation of it being an object at all. What is that like navigating that in the storytelling? It is difficult, of course, and it's where the... It's quite useful to be able to say, well, the BBC only gave us 13 and a half minutes for this. So you can point to the controversy.

You don't want to fully adjudicate it. Exactly. But it's a very real one, and it's very central to museum experience. And that's one of the difference, clearly, between the series we were doing your series. We were talking very much about objects in a museum to be presented to the public. But in a museum, the question, for instance, should some objects be shown at all? Yeah. when it will cause offense to members of a community from which in the past they came.

That's a very delicate thing, because what you're really talking about there are putting limits on the quest for knowledge. Am I not to be allowed to pursue certain lines of inquiry because it might offend your beliefs? that's a huge question. It is, yeah. The 18th century was very brisk about this. Yeah. Partly because it was really about the constraints of the churches, and it was saying that the constraints put on academic scientific research

by the churches were simply unacceptable, and that you had to go on pursuing the questions, even if the faithful were distressed. We can't take that position with the same confidence or we might choose not take it at all today in relation to other beliefs outside the European experience particularly.

It's a, I think, a very big philosophical question. Yeah, yeah. And I don't know the answer. Yeah. But it's a question that comes again and again, particularly, of course, in areas of the natural world and of human history.

Yeah, yeah. Because even, like, putting a date, on a Clovis, the sphere point of Clovis' peer point, people don't want to hear a date associated with it. They don't want to hear, you know, that people arrived. This was a very interesting discussion because, as I understand it, the archaeological evidence and the DNA evidence points to the fact that the Americas are peopled from Northeast Asia sometime around 15,000 years ago. That, of course, is a historical account that is at odds with the traditional beliefs of many indigenous Americans.

How one presents the one without offending the other is a very serious question. Yeah. We decided simply to allude to it, but not to explore it, but to present what we believe the thing tells us. Yeah, yeah. But it's a very, I don't know whether that was the right decision. Well, I don't know what other decision you could quite make, honestly. Like, I don't, I don't know. Because you have two irreconcilable understandings of the relationship between the people in the place and the story of the world.

Yeah. And we have different views of, you know, how reverent to sort of treat that object. I mean, like, you treated the object with great reverence. Like, it was super important. But Clovis point is there that meant, you know, 80% of the megafauna, like, you know, was gone. It's death to the mammoth. You know, it's all interesting and important stuff, but it's, they are not.

And so you just have to do your best to present the signs of it, I swear. I think that's as much as one can do in this kind of format. Yeah. So we're now making a history of the U.S. and 100 objects. If you had an advice for like things that you would think, I must, you must include. First of all, we're not going chronological. I decided this from the very beginning because I needed the freedom to jump around. And we also were like, we're open, we've sort of conceived of 25 or 30, and we have it open and we're trying to solicit responses from people.

So what is the type of thing that you think from your experience in the first 100 Object series is important to include? You're talking about the history from... It's kind of 1776. You know, it could be things that lead into it. I think what would be interesting is an outsider. We all know the things that came, as well, from the Europeans settling into America. But the things that came from America, for instance, tobacco. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, there is something that America gave the world that changed the world. Absolutely, absolutely. And smoking tobacco appears almost had begun in the territory of the United States. What object you would choose, I don't know, but that's how it's completely changed the world. That's a good point. And certainly in my childhood in the 50s and 60s, I mean, you couldn't be a credible teenager without a cigarette. And it could be a French one, but it could just easy be a lucky strike or whatever. But even the French ones were, of course, American derived.

So that kind of notion. And the same with blue jeans. Why did blue jeans represent a kind of freedom? I mean, when we were talking about the new freedoms, political and economic and sexual, we read objects that told those stories, I mean, the coins for votes for women, Hockley's, Prince, whatever, blue jeans and cigarettes mean something the same. It does. But what are the about, and how does that happen?

I mean, that seems to me something. That's where the history of the US is the history of the world. I hope some of your objects will be chosen, really, to make that. point. That's right. I mean, you've heard a couple of the early episodes. One of the ones that's that's sort of like the cigarettes and blue jeans, but maybe like not quite as known is this 60-degree threaded screw, which is an object that has very little outward significance to people, but really dominated and changed the world. I find that completely fascinating, because it's a totally different way of using an object from what we were doing. I mean, you were taking an

algebra, I mean, almost any screw would have done. Any screw, yeah. No particular screw. And using it to plot how the US dislodged the UK as the industrial determinant of the world. And that huge shift in economic political military power can all be read through the discussions about how to standardise globally, the thread on the screw. I knew nothing about it at all at all at all. And it was completely fascinating. And, of course, it's not at all surprising once it's spelled out, like all these things, the minute you're told you can understand, of course, that's what would have happened. It was brilliant. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Brilliant. So do you have any advice for me as I'm embarking on this? Like, is there a moment that I should be aware of? Is it like object number 68 where you're just like where it's... Yes, that's exactly the object, at which you will wonder.

Why am I doing this? Can I bear to go on? Am I ever going to get to the end? Is anybody still listening? I should watch out for that moment. The answer is yes. You will and they are. And we need it. So thank you.

Neil McGregor, thank you so much for talking with me. I had such a good time. Thank you. And now here's an episode of a history of the world in 100 objects. Enjoy. Every day I walk through the Egyptian sculpture gallery at the British Museum. And every day there are tour guides speaking every imaginable language, addressing groups of visitors who are craning to see the object that I'll be talking about in this program.

It's on every visitor's itinerary, and with the mummies, it's the most popular object in the British Museum. Why? To look at, it is decidedly dull. It's a grey stone about the size of one of those large suitcases you see people trundling around on wheels. at airports, and the rough edges show that it's been broken from a larger stone, with the fractures cutting across the text that covers one side. And when you read that text, it's pretty dull too. It's mostly bureaucratic jargon about tax concessions. But as so often in the museum, appearances are deceiving, because this dreary bit of broken granite has played a starring

role in three fascinating and different stories. The story of the Greek kings who ruled in Alexandria after Alexander the Great conquered Egypt, the story of the French and British imperial competition across the Middle East, after Napoleon invaded Egypt, and the extraordinary but peaceful scholarly contest that led to the most famous decipherment in history, the cracking of hieroglyphics. In the Memphis decree,

we find a Greek view of the world in Egyptian terms. I think it's quite weird, why you would put this sort of a statement, which is basically a statement of tax exemption, on such a heavy stone. I mean, 760 kilograms. Why did they do that? A history of the world in 100 objects. The Rosetta Stone.

Erected in 196 BC. Fandot El Rashid, Egypt. This is a week of objects connected to shifting empires and legendary rulers. from Alexander the Great to the Emperor Augustus. Over 2,000 years ago, from the Mediterranean and the Middle East to India and China, these leaders found different ways of physically projecting their power and their authority. Today's programme is particularly fascinating, though, because it's a special case. It's about a ruler who's not strong, but weak,

a king who has to bargain for and protect his power by borrowing the invincible strength of the gods, or, more precisely, the priests. were in Egypt, with Ptolemy V, a Greek boy king who came to the throne as an orphan in 205 BC at the age of six. Ptolemy the 5th was born into a great dynasty. The first Ptolemy was one of Alexander the Great's generals, who around a hundred years earlier had taken over Egypt following Alexander's death. The Ptolemies didn't trouble to learn Egyptian. They simply made all their officials speak Greek,

and so Greek would be the language of state administration in Egypt. Egypt for a thousand years. Perhaps their greatest achievement was to make their capital city, Alexandria, into the most brilliant metropolis of the Greek-speaking world. For centuries, it was second only to Rome. It was a cosmopolitan magnet for goods, people and ideas. The vast library of Alexandria was built by the Ptolemies. In it, they planned to collect all the world's knowledge, and Ptolemy's one and two created the famous Pharos Lighthouse, which became one of the seven wonders of the world. Such a lively, diverse city needed strong leadership. When Ptolemy V's father died suddenly, leaving the boy as king, the dynasty and its control of Egypt looked fragile.

The boy's mother was killed, the palace was drawn by soldiers, and there were revolt throughout the country, which delayed the young Ptolemy's coronation for years. It was in these volatile circumstances that Ptolemy V issued the Rosetta Stone, and others like it. Stone is not unique, there are another 17 similar inscriptions quite like it, all in three languages, and all proclaiming the greatness of the Ptolemies. These were put up in major temple complexes across Egypt. The Rosetta Stone was made in 196 BC on the first anniversary of the coronation of Ptolemy V, by then a teenager. It's a decree issued by Egyptian priests, ostensibly to mark the coronation and to declare Ptolemy's new status as a living. God. Divinity went with the job of being a pharaoh. The priests had given Ptolemy a full Egyptian

coronation at the sacred city of Memphis, and this greatly strengthened his position as the rightful ruler of Egypt. But there was a trade-off. Ptolemy may have become a god, but to get there, he'd had to negotiate some very unheavenly politics with his extremely powerful Egyptian priests. Dorothy Thompson, Emeritus Professor at Cambridge University, explains. The occasion which resulted in this decree was in some respects a change. There had been previous decrees and they take much the same form. But in this particular reign, the reign of a very young king whose kingdom was under attack for many quarters, one of the clauses of the Memphis decree, the Rosetta Stone, is that priests should no longer come every year to Alexandria. Alexandria was the new Greek

capital. Instead, they could meet at Memphis, the old centre of Egypt. This was new, and it may be seen perhaps, as a concession on the part of the royal household. The priests were critical in keeping the hearts and minds of the Egyptian masses on side for Ptolemy, and the Rosetta Stone was their reward. Not only does the decree allow the priests to remain in Memphis rather than coming to Alexandria, it also gives them a number of very attractive tax breaks. Of course, no teenager is likely to have thought this up. Somebody behind the throne was clearly thinking strategically on the boy's behalf, and more importantly, on the dynasty's behalf.

So the stone is simultaneously an expression of power and of compromise, although to read the whole content is about as thrilling as reading a new EU treaty written simultaneously in several languages. The content is bureaucratic, priestly and dry, But that, of course, is not the point. What matters about the Rosetta Stone is not what it says, but that it says it three times and in three different languages. In classical Greek, the language of the Greek rulers and the state administration,

and then in two forms of ancient Egyptian, the everyday writing of the people known as Demotic, and the priestly hieroglyphics, which have for centuries baffled Europeans. It was the Rosetta Stone that changed all that. and while the text of the stone itself is pretty unexciting, it dramatically opened up the entire world of ancient Egypt. By the time of the Rosetta Stone, 196 BC, hieroglyphs were no longer in general use.

They were used and understood only by the priests in the temples. 500 years later, even this restricted knowledge of how to read and write them had disappeared. The script of ancient Egypt was lost. The Rosetta Stone survived. unread through 2,000 years of further foreign occupations. Romans, Byzantans, Persians, Muslim Arabs and Ottoman Turks, all had stretches the rule in Egypt. At some point, the stone was moved from the temple at Saiz in the Nile Delta, where we think it was first erected, to El Rashid, or the town of

Rosetta, as we now know it, about 40 miles away. Then, in 1799, Napoleon arrived. The French invasion was not only military but intellectual. With the French army came scholars. Soldiers rebuilding fortifications in Rosetta dug up the stone and the scholars knew immediately that they had found something of great significance. The French took the stone

as a cultural trophy of war, but it never made it back to Paris. Pursued by Nelson, Napoleon was defeated and in 1801, the terms of the Treaty of Alexandria signed by the French, British and Egyptian generals, included the handing over of antiquities, and the Rosetta Stone was one of them. Most books will tell you that there are three languages on the Rosetta Stone,

but if you look on the broken side, you can see that in fact there are four, because there, stenciled on in English, you can read, captured by the British Army in 1801, presented by King George III. Nothing could make it clearer that if the text on the front of the stone is about the first European Empire in Africa,

Africa, Alexander the Greats. The finding of the stone stands at the beginning of another European adventure, the bitter rivalry between Britain and France for dominance in the Middle East and in Africa, which continued from Napoleon until the Second World War. We asked the Egyptian writer Adav Suef for her view of this history. So this stone so makes me think of how often Egypt has been the theatre of other people's battles. It's one of the earliest objects through which you can trace Western colonial interest in Egypt, because, of course, it was found by the French in the context of Napoleon's invasion of the country, and then appropriated by the British when they defeated him. And the French and the British argued over it, but no one seems to have considered that it belonged

to neither of them. But Egypt's foreign rulers, from the Romans to the Turks to the British, have always made free with Egypt's heritage. Egypt, for 2,000 years, had foreign rulers. And in 52, too much was made of the fact that Nosser was the first Egyptian ruler since the pharaohs. And I guess we've had two more since, although with varying results. The stone was brought back to the British Museum and immediately put on display. In the public domain, freely available for every scholar in the world to see, and copies and transcriptions were published worldwide. European scholars now set about the task of understanding the mysterious hieroglyphic script.

The Greek inscription was the one that every scholar could read and was therefore seen to be the key. But everybody was stuck. A brilliant English physicist and polymath Thomas Young correctly worked out that a group of hieroglyphs repeated several times on the Rosetta Stone wrote the sounds of a royal name, that of Ptolemy. It was a crucial first step, but Young hadn't quite cracked the code. A French scholar, Jean-Françain-Françain, then realised that not only the symbols for Tolley,

But all the hieroglyphs were both pictorial and phonetic. They recorded the sound of the Egyptian language. For example, on the last line of the hieroglyphic text on the stone, three signs spell out the sounds of the word for stone slab in Egyptian. A'hai. And then a fourth sign gives a picture showing the stone as it would originally have looked, a square slab with a rounded top. So sound and picture work together.

By 1822, Champolion had finally worked the whole thing out. From now on, the world could put words to the great objects, the statues and the monuments, the mummies and the papyrii of ancient Egyptian civilization. By the time of the Rosetta Stone, Egypt had already been under Greek rule for over a hundred years, and the Ptolemy's dynasty would last for another 150. The dynasty ended infamously with the reign of Clemeny. Leopatra the seventh, the Cleopatra, who beguiled and seduced both Julius Caesar and Mark Anthony. But with the death of Antony and Cleopatra, Egypt was conquered by Augustus, whose image I'll be

talking about later this week, and the Egypt of the Ptolemies became part of the Roman Empire. In the next program, I'll be in Rome's great contemporary, China, looking at how the Han dynasty operated a super-state and expanded their frontiers while keeping close control over every aspect of society. All this through a lacquer cup. Listen to the full 100 Objects series on Fridays right here in the 99% of visible feed. A history of the world in 100 Objects was a landmark collaboration between BBC Radio 4 and the British Museum. If you'd like to hear more of a history of the world in 100 objects, you can listen on BBC sounds in the UK.

And if you're outside the UK, you can find it wherever you get your podcast. Thank you.